Category: Raspberry Pi Projects

You can boot Raspberry Pis that are older than the Pi 4 directly off of USB attached Drive. When you’re done with the process, you won’t even need to have a microSD card in the Pi’s slot.

1. Create your external boot drive. There are two main ways to do this.

Use Etcher to “burn” the Raspbian OS to your external drive, a process we cover in our article on how to get started with Raspberry Pi. This works great, but doesn’t copy over any data from an existing build.

By default, Raspberry Pi boots up and stores all of its programs on a microSD memory card, which has rather limited bandwidth. On the Raspberry Pi 4, the memory card slot can achieve a theoretical maximum of 50 MBps, which is double the 25 MBps maximum on the Pi 3B+ (and other 3 series). you get more speed if you attach an external drive to one of the Raspberry Pi’s USB ports, especially with the Pi 4 offering USB 3.0 connections that have a theoretical maximum of 660 MBps.

Unfortunately, at this time, you can’t boot a Raspberry Pi 4 off an external drive. But you can force the Raspbian OS to use an external drive for its “root” partition, which holds all of its programs and data. So, in effect, you have a small boot partition on a microSD card but the meat of the entire operating system would still live on your speedy SSD or Flash Drive. A future firmware update will allow the Pi 4 to boot off of external drives, no microSD card required, The instructions directly below work on a current-day Pi 4 or an earlier model, but if you want to boot your Pi 3 off of an external drive scroll down to the next section of this page.Read More

If you’ve got a bunch of movies, shows or other local video files and can’t decide which one to watch, you can make Raspberry Pi choose for you, at the touch of a button. To be fair, there are easier ways to play a random video, either from local files or on the web, but they aren’t as fun as this project. So grab the popcorn and let’s start building and coding our own Raspberry Pi random video player!

Hardware

Building the circuit for this project is simple. We only require three buttons, connected to the GPIO at pins 2,3,4 and each of these buttons also needs to be connected to GND, for this we can use a single GND pin on the Pi, and a female to male jumper wire. Connected to the – rail of a breadboard means that we have multiple GND connections that can be connected via the two male to male jumper wires. See the diagram in the download for this project for more information.When the hardware is built, attach all of the accessories required for your Pi and boot to the Raspbian desktop.Read More

A VPN (Virtual Private Network) protects your privacy by routing all your Internet traffic through an encrypted server that your ISP (or hackers) can’t see. Setting up and using a log-free VPN service from your PC desktop is straightforward enough, but other devices in your home such as your game console and set-top box don’t let you install VPN software.

One solution is to buy a router that can connect directly to a VPN service, protecting all the traffic on your home network a single stroke. But it could be cheaper (and simpler) just to route all your traffic through Raspberry Pi that remains connected to the VPN at all times.

With just a few fairly simple scripts, you can configure any Raspberry Pi to be a headless VPN gateway. This means that when it is connected to your router, you can send traffic to it from other devices before they connect to the outside world – essentially putting them behind a VPN. Read More

In order for computers to communicate with each other over the internet, all participants in the network have a unique address: Through IP addresses, clients know exactly which servers they should address. But no user can be expected to memorize the numerical sequence of the address, so instead, domain names are used. For this, there’s a domain name system (DNS): It converts numbers into domains and vice versa. To do this, clients first have to query one or more DNS servers before they get the correct address. This can cost valuable time. Therefore, it can be useful to speed up the internet connection by setting up a dedicated DNS server. A Raspberry Pi, the small but many-sided computer, provides a good base for this. We explain to you here how DNS functions and how you can set up your own home DNS server.